My friend’s son said to me: “How can you be a headteacher if you don’t teach? What do you teach? Come on, surely you must teach? The clue is in the title, headteacher.”
Awkward and guilt-inducing, it gave me the feeling of not doing something that I thought and knew I should.
The barber hit the same nerve when he asked: “So, do you still teach?”
Why do I feel such guilt as a headteacher? Leaders who run railways surely don’t drive the 7:30am train from King’s Cross to York once a week? Do they? Should they?
Tomorrow, that guilt-inducing feeling will be no more. Buckle up, tomorrow I will teach a lesson for the first time since just before the pandemic – a hiatus of more than four years.
I am going to be honest. It is the night before, my family are in bed and I am sorting out the cat litter tray, feeding her, and putting my breakfast in a bowl to expedite my morning routine.
I play out what is going to happen in my mind, the many lessons I’ve taught before, and imagine what it will be like in class.
I’m excited and nervous at the same time. I smile. The feeling reminds me of before I taught my very first lesson as a trainee teacher at Copthall Girls School in London. It reminds me of the first lesson in every school I’ve taught since. I’ve done it before, and it will be fine. It will, I tell myself.
I spend the morning doing my normal work. Throughout the day, the thought that I am teaching a double lesson this afternoon for the first time in a few years jumps into my mind.
I’m a little proud of the thought. And, being honest again, I’ve taken every opportunity in the first week back to tell staff that I, the headteacher, will teach again.
I finish my lunch duty slightly early and head to my classroom. As I walk up the stairs, I clench my hands and feel the perspiration. A thought passes through my mind about a potential story of a headteacher who passes out on their way to teach their first lesson for a few years.
“Please don’t pass out headteacher,” I tell myself. I don’t know why I’m thinking like this, I have never fainted and all I’m going to do is teach a class.
The lesson that I am about to teach is a sociology class with the delightful and inquisitive 13CSo1. It makes sense then to turn to sociology to explain why teaching might just be helpful to my leadership of the school.
Max Weber, one of the founders of sociology, wanted to understand human action by trying to see the world as others see it. To do this, we must understand.
Influencing a branch of sociology that understands the social world through the lens of individual actors, “verstehen” has become a central term.
If you look up this German word, you will be told that it means “to understand”. However, Weber is asking, through the concept of verstehen, for deep understanding based on a bucketful of empathy. Step into the shoes of others to understand.
It seemed sensible to stop teaching while I was learning to be a headteacher and then through the demands of running a school during the pandemic. I like to think that I had enough experience teaching from my time as a teacher to lead teachers, but this experience is a form of verstehen that reconnects me.
The lesson-planning, the technology, the physicality of teaching and the thousand things that teachers must think of are all pressures that you just have to remind yourself of.
Yes, I forget to take the register and a colleague knocks at my classroom door to let me know. Thank you. Yes, my examples are rusty and I probably talk too much. But, the exchange of ideas, students thinking and answering questions is as rewarding as a train driver who hasn’t driven for a while pulling out of King’s Cross in a brand-new train.
I look forward to all that I will experience teaching again. I’m going to experience instructional coaching for the first time. I’m going to try and go computer desktop-free and teach only with my iPad. I’m revising my resources. I’m thinking about cognition and how I’m going to make learning stick. I hope that my decision-making as a headteacher will surely improve as I have a more valid understanding of the core business of the school.
Leaders set the culture and the direction of the school. It is a privilege to lead a school for the current children and build something for the lives of children that do not yet exist. While I appreciate that I don’t have a full timetable, teaching again takes me to a different dimension of leading.
The realm of verstehen provides the opportunity to reconnect to a central process within the organisation I lead.
Neil Renton is the headteacher of a large comprehensive secondary school of more than 2,100 pupils in North Yorkshire and author of the recently published New School Leader: What now? For details, visit www.criticalpublishing.com/new-school-leader